| This project seeks to "get behind" the virtues in two ways. First, it seeks to "get behind" or support the retrieval of virtue in contemporary ethics, and second, to "get behind" the virtues by way of understanding the conscious and unconscious processes of cognition through which moral agents acquire virtue and form Christian moral character. I argue that this process happens through an imaginative appropriation of our everyday experience. I show how the understanding of the imagination in cognitive linguistics helps to explain the way virtue ethicists use Scripture as a resource in forming virtuous character.;Cognitive linguistics, built upon or consistent with the findings of cognitive science, analyzes language to reveal the way humans organize and understand their experience. There is currently wide agreement in cognitive linguistics that language prompts the construction of meaning within the human brain. Such construction is inherently imaginative, since bodily movement and visual observation shapes how we express ourselves. The imagination is not a single capacity; rather, it is the interaction of many unconscious cognitive processes that integrate divergent realms of human experience, personal and cultural. Such interaction may or may not prompt a visual mental image; nonetheless, when we read or reflect on a text, our imagination is at work.;To illustrate how cognitive linguistics helps us to understand a virtue exhorted by a text, I analyze the semantic domains and frames, conceptual and primary metaphors, categorization, image schemas and conceptual blends of the Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:25--37). This biblical story expands the religious and cultural category of neighbor and illustrates the virtue of compassion in the particular way that the Samaritan responds to the vulnerable one. The analysis demonstrates how a cognitive linguistic reading of this text can open us to the dynamics within it that potentially shape us. If, over time, we find ways to care about matters similar to those found in Scripture and to live in ways it upholds or warns against, then we open ourselves to grow in those virtues exhorted by the Bible. |
